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“Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

“God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.”
― peter kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.”
― Hans Küng

“What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“The Irish people didn't get on that well with each other either. They hated the Catholics, was the main issue, as I see. You can't blame them for that. If I understand correctly, Catholics do not believe in contraception. So, you know, sex is not relaxing.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, The Ghosts of Ashbury High

“In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“J.R.R. Tolkien was also opposed to the Novus Ordo Mass. Simon Tolkien recalls his grandfather’s protest to the Novus Ordo:
"I vividly remember going to church with him in Bour-nemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn’t agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.”
― Dr. Taylor Reed Marshall

“Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by the performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the innocent.”
― Pope Pius XI

“When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one -- if not dozens -- of his priests repeatedly molested, abused and/or raped young children for decades, and he did nothing to stop it. How much does God believe the pope's argument that Vatican PR trumps pedophilia? Joe Ratzinger, 82, will soon find out.”
― Mark Morford

“Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!”
― Karl Rahner, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer

“The Pope would have an easier job than the President of the United States in adopting a change of course. He has no Congress alongside him as a legislative body nor a Supreme Court as a judiciary. He is absolute head of government, legislator and supreme judge in the church. If he wanted to, he could authorize contraception over night, permit the marriage of priests, make possible the ordination of women and allow eucharistic fellowship with this Protestant churches. What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama?”
― Hans Küng

“The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.”
― Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum: Encyclical Letter - Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour

“Wherever men are still theological there is still some chance of their being logical.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Irish Impressions

“Lord, you have granted me your secret friendship by opening the sacred ark of your divinity, your deified heart, to me in so many ways as to be the source of all my happiness; sometimes imparting it freely, sometimes as a special mark of our mutual friendship. You have so often melted my soul with your loving caresses that, if I did not know the abyss of your overflowing condescensions, I should be amazed were I told that even your Blessed Mother had been chosen to receive such extraordinary marks of tenderness and affection (Adapted from The Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude).”
― Gertrude the Great, Life and Revelations of St Gertrude the Great

“In the absence of virtue and wisdom, intelligence becomes a servant of evil.”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in The Hobbit

“It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.”
― Dale Ahlquist, Common Sense 101: Lessons from Chesterton

“But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany �� two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import....

Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches�� and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Books are the food of the soul. Good and wholesome food given to a hungry body will nourish it, but if the food is poisonous, it will be injurious to the system. The same happens with reading. If people read good and instructive books at regular and proper times, it will strengthen and nourish them greatly.”
― Anthony Mary Claret, The Autobiography of St. Anthony Mary Claret

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
― Charles A. Coulombe, Puritan's Empire

“love is the inclination, strength, and power for the soul in making its way to God, for love unites it with God. The more degrees of love it has, the more deeply it enters into God and centers itself in him.”
― John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross

“  Man and woman were made “for each other”—not that God left them half-made and incomplete: he created them to be a communion of persons,”
― The Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church: Complete and Updated

“For Chesterton and Tolkien, the goodness, truth, and beauty of fairy stories are to be found in the way they judge the way things are from the perspective of the way things ought to be. The should judges the is. This is the way things ought to be. We do not condone selfishness merely because it is normal, nor should we. A healthy perspective always judges selfishness—most especially our own selfishness—from the perspective of selflessness. In the language of religion, we always judge sin from the perspective of virtue, that which is wrong from the perspective of that which is right. Fairy stories share with religion the belief in objective morality, which is the fruit of the knowledge of the union of the natural with the supernatural and therefore the communion of the one with the other. This moral perspective is condemned by the materialist and the relativist, which is why such people are equally skeptical of the respective value of fairy stories and religion, seeing both as intrinsically untrue.”
― Joseph Pearce, Frodo's Journey: Discover the Hidden Meaning of The Lord of the Rings

“Motherhood, more than most other types of love, quickly acclimates us to what true love is: an act of the will, not simply a feeling.”
― Carrie Gress, Ultimate Makeover: The Transforming Power of Motherhood

“The Liturgy itself is prayer; the confession of faith finds its proper place in the celebration of worship.”
― The Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church: Complete and Updated